Transition Game: Baseball

Bad Innovations ()

2006-02-17T05:15:52-05:00

There are lies, damn lies and then there's Jayson Stark's claim that interleague play is one on the top 25 innovations of the last 25 years.

For the ninth straight year, many more people attended interleague games last season than intraleague games. For the fourth straight year, the World Series did not feature teams that had met during the season. And wasn't interleague worth it just to see Kenny Rogers hit a triple?

So many bad arguments, so little time. But the biggest reason interleague play stinks is that it's a goofy half measure. There isn't very much interleague play, so why should anyone care? And if there were more of it, there'd be no need to have leagues. So what is the point? Kenny Rogers triples. Thanks, Bud Selig.

Roids and the Homer Binge: Another View ()

2005-10-14T08:38:16-05:00

Here's very interesting research from Art DeVany claiming that roids cannot explain the seeming surge in home run hitting. If you still have an open mind about these issues, pls read it (I'm not saying it's conclusive, just that it's worth learning more ab out it (hat tip MR).

I take up the matter of steroids more directly and also such possible influences as "hotter" baseballs, altered ball parks, smaller strike zone and find them all to be lacking. They do not stand up to verifiable tests or statistics. And they shouldn't because no explanation is required. There has been no increase in MLB home run hitting. Three home run hitting geniuses appeared in a brief time span and will soon be gone. Enjoy them and don't look for explanations when none are required. The law of home runs and extreme human accomplishment that I develop tell us that we never know when this kind of genius will appear, only that it will be rare and intermittent.

RTWT. That's an order.

Where This Angel Feared to Tread (and thank God the Yanks and Red Sox Lost) ()

2005-10-13T14:25:52-05:00

My friend John points out: Can you imagine what would have happened if game 2 between the Angels and White Sox -- decided as it was thanks to a terrible ump call in the 9th -- happened in Boston or New York with the Stanks and the Dead Sox playing one another? Good grief. All holy hell would have broken out.

I will say this: If the Angels win this series it will be because Mike Scioscia decided after the game not to make a big issue of it. If the Angels went into Anaheim with their skip bitching and moaning about how they were robbed, they would have lost the series. Since Scioscia did the right thing by not making a huge issue of it after the game, the Angels stand a good chance of taking this series.

Some commentators after the game suggested the call proves the need for instant replay. I totally disagree. The game is more interesting because of the human error. Seeing Scioscia handle it was great (I say this as someone who loathes Scioscia -- don't ask me why, ask Frank Robinson). It has made the series far more interesting. Yeah, the Angels got jerked around, but hey, that's baseball.

Tape-Measure Shot? ()

2005-09-03T13:39:14-05:00

The Wall Street Journal ($) has a fascinating piece on how baseball does not have a reliable way of measuring how far home runs travel.

Of course, tracking homers isn't a simple process, and it usually involves calculating how far a ball would have gone if it had hit flat ground instead of bouncing off a light pole or hitting the picture window of a restaurant in the stadium's upper deck. And the numbers aren't the least bit relevant to the outcome of a game. Still, the true distance of an epic homer is precisely the sort of barstool topic that fans are intensely curious about.
But at a time when sports such as tennis and golf are using lasers, microchips and computer models to determine the trajectories of shots, baseball is running out of excuses. Not only does the technology exist, but the necessary equipment has already been installed at nearly a dozen ballparks.

Ed Plumacher, president of QuesTec, a company that has fitted cameras in 11 major league stadiums to monitor the performance of umpires, says that with an investment of about $15,000 per stadium in new software, this system could measure home-run distances to within one meter. The only trouble, he says: "I haven't found anybody who wants to pay for it."

Why Is Baseball Ignoring Mike Marshall? ()

2005-08-28T14:22:39-05:00

Former pitcher Mike Marshall is claiming he can train pitchers to avoid injury. This Murray Chass piece is fascinating.

At his training center, where the students live for 40 or 48 weeks, he teaches his method of pitching, which employs Newton's three laws of motion.
"There's a better way of producing force without using the traditional pitching motion, which has flaws," he said. "This is an epidemic that needs to be researched. We have to teach them how to pitch so they don't have flaws."

To eliminate flaws, Marshall teaches a different pitching motion from the one pitchers traditionally use.

"I want the ball to go back toward second base, then toward home plate in as straight a line as possible," he said. "The traditional motion has anywhere from 5 to 9 feet of side-to-side movement in ways that put unnecessary stress on the arm and do no good for the quality of pitches and cause injuries."

Marshall's pitching motion also requires a pitcher to use his legs differently and not "reverse rotate" his hips as much as pitchers traditionally have.

It calls for a lot more reporting -- if the benefits of Marshall's training are so obvious, why is he being ignored? -- but if Marshall is on to something, this should get a lot more attention.

La Russa to James: Stuff It ()

2005-08-28T14:11:42-05:00

The Times has a good look at the controversy in baseball over sabermetrics.

Like any good intellectual spat, this one involves high-brow questions and low-brow insults. It also has attracted interest from fields as far from the dugout as medicine, Hollywood and Wall Street, which find themselves grappling with the same question as baseball managers: when information can be gathered more cheaply and quickly than ever before, should people rely less on their hunches and more on numbers? "I've been sat down and told they can give me a better way to do everything," Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals and the hero of a new book celebrating the hunch, said last week, describing the statistics crowd. "They really are convinced that they can sit there and crunch out a formula that negates my power of observation. "It's been a little irritating, because there's a certain arrogance with that whole group."

Roid Ragers ()

2005-08-08T11:21:17-05:00

Andrew Zimbalist with a devastating review of the new Howard Bryant book on 'roids.

In "Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball," Howard Bryant suggests that Selig and his lieutenants were well aware that these players were taking steroids, but they refused to rain on baseball's parade. Baseball's recovery was too fragile and the excitement was too intoxicating.
That's an outline of the argument in Bryant's 400-page book. The story of steroids and baseball is certainly worth telling, and Bryant has told much of it reasonably well. In the end, though, Bryant tells a meandering, incomplete, distorted and tendentious tale.

One basic problem is Bryant plays fast and loose with his numbers and sources. ...

Bryant ends his book in a messianic tone. Not only does the steroid issue lose all ambiguity, it undoes all the gains baseball has made since 1995. He writes: "The speed with which Selig and his unassailable decade have come completely undone is stunning." Again, Bryant lacks evidence. In 2005, baseball is setting all-time attendance records.

Dick Allen, by the Numbers ()

2005-07-28T11:39:04-05:00

Allen Barra makes a strong case, based on stats, that Dick Allen belongs in the Hall of Fame:

Richard Anthony "Dick" (aka "Richie") Allen is the best player eligible for the Hall of Fame.
...Mr. Allen, who played for just 10 full seasons between 1963 and 1977, led his league in home runs twice, RBIs once, on-base percentage twice, slugging three times, and won the 1972 American League MVP award.

...as Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus points out: "Allen's numbers were compiled at the most difficult period for hitters in baseball history. If he had played in the '90s, they would be dazzling." In the 1960s and '70s, though, Mr. Allen's stats were dazzling enough.

First baseman Orlando Cepeda, a contemporary of Mr. Allen's who was ushered into the hall in 1999, hit 379 home runs to 351 for Mr. Allen, who played most of his games at first base. But Mr. Cepeda was at bat nearly 1,600 more times than Mr. Allen. Another Hall of Fame first baseman who played during Mr. Allen's era, Harmon Killebrew, had 573 home runs in 22 seasons, but Mr. Allen out hit him .292 to .256, won three slugging titles to Mr. Killebrew's one, and had more doubles and triples than Mr. Killebrew while batting about 1,800 fewer times.

...Baseball historian Craig Wright, in an article for the Society for American Baseball Research, found much evidence to support this. Mr. Allen's Phillies manager, Gene Mauch, told Mr. Wright that "Dick's teammates always liked him" and "If I was managing today...I'd take him in a minute." Chuck Tanner, Mr. Allen's manager on the 1972 White Sox, said: "Dick Allen piloted the team as much as I did. We were co-managers."

'These Are Not So Much Bats as Clubs' ()

2005-07-26T14:51:36-05:00

I love this story. Absolutely love it. It demonstrates everything that's wrong or right or both with the incremental changes that technology introduces into a sport like baseball.

Louisville Slugger keeps the specifications on all the models of bats it has made dating back to the early '30s and has reference models of many bats from before that. Informed of this, I asked the company if it would produce several replica bats so that I could bring them to a big-league game and let current players test them during batting practice. A couple of weeks later, a shipment arrived on my doorstep containing exact replicas of bats originally made for Honus Wagner, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth.
I couldn't have been more excited if the Smithsonian had mailed me the U.S. Constitution. After all, how many batting titles did James Madison win?

There are two main things you notice when you pick up these bats. One, they're big. The Ruth and Shoeless Joe bats are 36 inches long and weigh 38-40 ounces, depending on whose scale you trust. Next, with the exception of the Ruth bat, the handles are much thicker than modern bats. Scott Spiezio measured the Shoeless Joe bat against his own and found that Jackson's handle was almost as thick as his is at the trademark. There are Hickory Farms beef sticks that are thinner. The Cobb and Wagner bats also have almost no knobs.

How the hell did they swing these things without steroids? These are not so much bats as clubs.

I Don't Want No Cubs ()

2005-07-06T09:02:40-05:00

The Chicago Cubs scalp their own tickets (and apparently it's legal).

I was recently pointed to the web page of a disgruntled fan (click here) who found out that a ticket re-seller is owned by the same company that owns Wrigley Field, the Tribune Company. And of course, the ticket reseller charges much more than the face value.
Why? Some guesses: you get the extra income without the negative publicity of raising ticket prices. The Tribune Company also gets to hide income in a subsidiary, which might be useful when negotiating with Major League Baseball over revenue sharing issues. Regardless of the economic motivations, disgruntled fans filed a lawsuit, which the Tribune Company eventually won

Isn't it possible to do a better job of pricing so they don't need to do this?

Is It Like 1919? ()

2004-12-09T12:53:04-05:00

George Will thinks the steroids scandal is a "stain" on baseball and framed the issue this way:

"Probably sometime late in the 2005 season or early in the next one, Barry Bonds, who already has 703 career home runs, will begin a game with 754, one short of Henry Aaron's record. Would you cross the street to see Bonds hit number 755?"

To which I answer: put down your beer and let's cross the damn street! What numbnutz wouldn't? Hello, George Will, what planet are you on? Even if you loathe Bonds and loathe him even more for cheating -- sentiments I understand even if I don't totally share -- who wouldn't want to be at the game where he hits #755, if just for the spectacle of it? I talked about this at length with my brother last night over several pitchers at a local sports bar and we just don't get what Will is talking about.

Anyway, the most annoying comment of late comes courtesy of my favorite sports writer, Tom Boswell.

"For Bonds, the number 73 will only loom larger. Even as, for the rest of us, it moves toward the horizon of memory and shrinks until it finally takes its place, remote but still distinct, next to that other sad number that never entirely fades: 1919."

That number was the year of the Black Sox scandal. But the comparison is asinine. The Black Sox conspired to lose games on purpose. The juice-heads conspired to take 'roids -- so that they might help their teams win games. This difference is critical.

Barry Barry Quite Contrary ()

2004-12-09T12:34:11-05:00

OK, it's been a while and I apologize for the delay. Things have been hectic.

And look at what's happened in my absence. Maybe the biggest sports and tech story ever -- Bonds, Giambi, 'roids, Bush and McCain -- blows up all over the place. That'll teach me a lesson -- never move again!

So, people are asking me, Transition Game, what do you make of all this? So I'll tell you -- I don't really know. OK, well I do, but my thoughts on this are complicated, so let me go through them.

First of all, I am a baseball romantic -- not in the baseball-is-a-metaphor-for-life way of George Will, but just in the sense that I love the game, love stats, and love comparing athletes and teams over time. Comparing records set and broken is a part of that, so you might expect me to be peeved to no end at Barry Bonds. But I'm not, and here's why.

A very good source of mine at the US Department of Justice alerted me many many months ago that the feds had the dirt on Bonds and other players that they used prohibited substances. At the time, even though I suspected players like Bonds might have been juiced, I was a little taken aback. But over time, as the realization sunk in, I found that I just didn't care that much. In fact, this last baseball season, I was interested in seeing Bonds above all players -- maybe in part because I knew he was or at least had been using banned substances.

Barry has been called a "freak" and other nasty things by critics. But I didn't see him that way. Look at him and watch him play. He's absolutely the most compelling thing at the plate in the game today. And knowing he was taking creams and clears didn't diminish any of that for me.

So what about the "integrity of the game" and all that? Well, the critics have a point. As your parents used to say, rules are rules. These guys were breaking them, etc. Fair point.

But maybe we need to rethink the prohibition on some of the banned substances. See here and here for more on that (but see here for an excellent piece on why taking roids is bad for the game). Matt Welch at Reason has an absolutely must-read article on the Bonds take-down by the feds. If you read nothing else on this subject, read that piece.

I keep coming back the same point I've made before -- the only way to get juice out of the game is for the players to want it out of the game. But if steroids, when properly administered, aren't terribly bad for you, and if fans want better and better performance, where're the incentives pushing players, especially older players who want to stay in top shape?

Lastly, no matter what one thinks of the players using banned substances, the leak of supposedly sealed grand jury testimony is bad. Very very very very bad. And the widespread abuse of our criminal justice system should be a much bigger concern to people than player abuse of their bodies or fan trust.

Geekball Defended ()

2004-08-06T11:25:00-05:00

In this fascinating and fact-fileld piece on sabermetrics, Larry Mankhen demonstrates why baseball is still far and away the most interesting sport to write about and debate.

There are some who still refuse to look at the evidence, and they never will. I say nuts to them. They're not going to come around, and we shouldn't care anymore. Let them continue to overvalue heart, chemistry and other intangibles. The truth is on our side, and by focusing on the next generation of fans, the next generation of sportswriters, and the next generation of general managers, the game will be better served, and objective statistical analysis will be given equal footing with subjective scouting.
We do this not because we desire to hold the popular viewpoint, but because we love the game, and we love our teams. We do this because we want our favorite teams to be run intelligently. We do this because it's the right thing to do.

The King of Queens, Rick Peterson ()

2004-07-29T11:10:46-05:00

Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, another former Billy Beane boy, has been doing great things with the Mets pitching staff:

Peterson cannot be confined to the stadium, using his spare time to develop a baseball-specific laptop computer and a software program that computes data on every hitter. Peterson tells his pitchers what a given hitter is batting against 1-2 changeups on the inside corner of the plate, and what they should throw as a result.
"There's a reason why we have the best pitching staff in baseball," said Tom Glavine, who is making a bid for comeback player of the year.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball" on sports journalism. It has presented baseball with an entirely new story line. That's an impressive feat for a journalist to have pulled off. As Lewis said, he fell in love with the story of guys using brains and bits and bytes to gain a competitive edge. It's a great story, and it's continuing to pay journlistic and narrative dividends.

We Can Rebuild Him... ()

2004-06-03T13:18:29-05:00

Like all normal redblooded American males coming of age in the 1970s and early 80s, I was a huge fan of The Six Million Dollar Man.

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first Bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better . . . stronger . . . faster."

I, like my other male compatriots, loved the Bionic Man in part because we REALLY loved the Bionic Woman. But that's not important right now.

Wired reports that baseball teams are figuring out how to, in a way, rebuild their pitchers to make them more effective.

Fleisig is the research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, dedicated to improving athletic performance and preventing sports-related injuries. He is also fast becoming the biomechanist to the stars. Every winter, major-league pitchers head to ASMI in droves to be picked apart by the unblinking eyes of the lab's 500-frames-per-second high-speed cameras and infrared, 3-D optical motion-capture system. It's all about finding that little something extra that could mean the difference between playing in the next World Series and watching it on TV.
Pitching, it's often said, is 90 percent of the game. By identifying a mechanically unsound motion in his delivery, a pitcher can add several miles an hour to his fastball or put more snap on his slider - and increase his team's chances of winning more games. So, why trust something so important to the human eye? "My motto is, 'In God we trust; all others must have data,'" says Rick Peterson, the pitching coach for the New York Mets. In February, he brought all of the Mets pitching prospects to Birmingham for a preseason tune-up.

Sounds like the Moneyball revolution: "In God we trust; all others must have data." When watching PGA events on TV the commentators always discuss how players -- typically Tiger Woods -- spend time breaking down and then rebuilding their swings. I'm not sure if golfers spend time at ASMI, but if it works for a pitcher's delivery, one would imagine it would work for a golf swing, a tennis serve, a slapshot...

On a side note, doesn't the Six Million Dollar Man sounds like something Dr. Evil would come up with in "Austin Powers"? One meeeeeelion dollars. Six large is chump change in professional sports these days.